Mechanization and automation are as important for plant growers and nurserymen as it is for any other field of agriculture. This is because there is a tremendous amount of labor involved in the operation of a nursery, and the growers have to contend with the problems of scarcity of labor and overall labor costs just as any other business.
One particular labor intensive area is that of transferring or transplanting relatively young and small plants from their initial rooting container to a larger plant container or to the field for further growth and development. As in other fields of agriculture, a great deal of nurseries and plant producing facilities generally perform this operation by hand. Consequently, plant transfer and transplanting are time consuming and very inefficient. As a practical matter, the use of manual labor to transplant such plants severely limits the capacity of a farm or nursery for handling such transfer or transplanting operations.
Therefore, there is and continues to be, a need for a fully automatic plant transplanting system that will automatically transfer and transplant plants/plugs from an initial growing tray or container to a transfer area or second container for further growth and development in order to produce a superior plant in a greenhouse or in the field.
Numerous field tests indicate that air-pruned cuttings and seedlings are significantly superior in growth performance both in the trays and after transplanting and that effective fully automatic transplanting can be performed with the air-pruned seedlings for various crops.